Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Near the start of his 1973 documentary F for Fake, having already established
the film’s preoccupation with charlatanism and trickery, the film’s director
and narrator Orson Welles delivers a sober promise to the camera: that for the
next hour, he will tell us only the truth. With this established, the viewer
settles into the film’s discursive approach to its material, focusing on master
art forger Emile de Hory and the author Clifford Irving (who wrote both a
biography of de Hory and then an alleged autobiography of Howard Hughes, itself
later revealed as a fraud) while digressing in multiple directions – back to
memories of Citizen Kane and Welles’
famous War of the Worlds radio
broadcast, into scenes of Welles having dinner, and frequently into footage of
Hungarian model Oja Kodar (Welles’ lover for the last twenty years of his
life).

F for Fake

Eventually the film narrows into a single
extended anecdote about Kodar, her grandfather (also an art forger) and Pablo
Picasso – a strange story for sure, but no more than anything already laid
before us. After its apparent conclusion, Welles suddenly starts to back pedal,
disowning elements of what he’s just been telling us, and then he refers back
to his promise about that hour of veracity. “That hour, ladies and gentlemen,”
he then announces, “is over. For the last seventeen minutes I’ve been lying my
head off.”

It’s the kind of thing that can only work
once, and nowadays in a more skeptical, wised-up world, it might not work at
all. But when I first saw F for Fake,
at the age of sixteen or so, I remember being utterly stunned. It was a moment
that fundamentally influenced my sense of cinema – maybe it was even the moment when I realized the passivity
of how I’d been watching films, and the inadequacy of that. Over time one’s
views of things evolve and shift of course, so that at the extreme Welles’ ruse
might almost seem to unbalance the film – it says more about his
self-dramatization than about the movie’s ostensible subject. But Welles’ obvious
delight in the material is one of F for
Fake’s great pleasures, and the degree to which the director may or may not
reveal himself between the frames is the real
issue on which a certificate of authenticity might be demanded. As a director
who traveled the world with his editing table, and who created dazzling
juxtapositions and leaps in F for Fake,
Welles obviously knew in the first place that the concept of an “hour of truth”
in cinema is hopelessly compromised.

In my 1,100 or so words here, I can say
nothing of interest to those who know and value Welles’ work, but in casual
conversations at work recently I’ve realized again how small that group is. I
wrote about Welles some five years ago, but on that occasion I concentrated
mainly on Citizen Kane. No apology
necessary for that. As I wrote then, Citizen
Kane tends to be a film that everyone knows about and knows to be great,
but which few people have actually seen (or if they have seen it, they often
seem not to know what the fuss is all about). And the later films have little
prominence in the popular consciousness.

One Man Band

Five years ago I referred to “numerous
unfinished Welles projects that have become more famous than other directors’
finished works. Most famous are Don
Quixote, The Deep, and above all The
Other Side of the Wind, a mid-70’s expose of Hollywood that sounds strange
and twisted and utterly brilliant…and will probably never be seen. This odd
shadow career is unprecedented in an art form that depends so much on
logistical planning and having the money in place – you weep at a creative
force so often thwarted.”

Well, I now see that a little bit
differently. The Criterion Collection’s DVD of F for Fake has one of the most wonderful extras of any DVD I’ve
ever come across – the documentary Orson
Welles: One Man Band. This features two scenes from Other Side of the Wind (both stunning) and others from an
unfinished Merchant of Venice and a
barely started version of Isak Dinesen’s The
Dreamers, among others. And then there are items I could never have
imagined, such as some comedy skits filmed in Britain in the 60’s and 70’s that
allow Welles to indulge his love of playacting for no great artistic purpose.
Which merely makes them all the more endearing. Oh, and then there’s the talk show
pilot he filmed with The Muppets.

The most common reason for this trove of
loose ends is just that Welles didn’t have the money to finish the projects, or
else only got raised from shady and unreliable sources (Other Side of the Wind was seized by its Iranian financiers, and
remains tangled up in murky circumstances). There’s also some sheer bad luck –
supposedly the negative of Merchant of
Venice was stolen when nearly completed, and no one knows where it went.
But it’s plain that Welles’ restless creative energy maximized the
possibilities for such mishaps. While he was making F for Fake, he took on the strange side project of filming himself
reading aloud from Moby Dick. Thankfully, F
for Fake was finished nevertheless. But chronologies of his work reveal a
strange pattern of overlaps and deferrals and fragmented involvement, not like
that of any filmmaker I’ve ever known of.

Spontaneous Joy

It would be trite and foolish to say we’re
better off this way, but One Man Band
makes it joyously easy to make the best out of what we’ve got. Citizen Kane challenged preconceptions
by deploying certain tools of Hollywood studio cinema more imaginatively and
richly than anyone had before, and then misfortune immediately set in. Welles
made The Magnificent Ambersons then
was sent to Brazil under the umbrella of the wartime effort to make It’s All True. In his absence, the
studio butchered Ambersons, and the
legend of squandered talent was already seeded. Thirty years later, such
incidents were endemic to Welles’- I
was going to say career, but that word has a sense of linearity that doesn’t
seem right here. I suppose I should just say his life.

We have plenty of examples of great
filmmakers who prepare meticulously and take years between projects, and who
consequently make fewer films than we (and in at least some cases they) would
have hoped – Kubrick, Malick, and so forth. In a way, Welles’ late career
speaks to too much spontaneous joy in cinema, to an undimmed thrill at new
ideas and possibilities. His glorious fragments make other directors seem
confined by systems and expectations. Instead of weeping, as I suggested five
years ago, I now think it’s a gorgeous legacy, with the loss of what might have
been on screen outweighed by the challenge to our notions of what’s a full and
successful career in cinema. All of this makes the F for Fake DVD one of the most amazing artifacts that I know of. I
couldn’t recommend it to you more strongly.

Thursday, January 22, 2015

Travellers
and Magicians is apparently the first feature film
ever shot in Bhutan, and in my naive way, I wonder why this wouldn’t provide a
reason for anyone – anyone at all – to choose to see this film over Hitch or Boogeyman or any of the other movies that kicked its ass,
financially speaking, the weekend of its release. I mean, whatever one’s
affinity for Will Smith or the horror genre (and I certainly bear neither of
these any hostility), isn’t it somehow self-evident, for Chrissake,that it would be more worthwhile seeing the first feature film ever shot in Bhutan!?
Apparently not. When I say this kind of thing to people, they react as if I’ve
veered into anthropology rather than cinema, and they’re not entirely wrong of
course. I mean, I feel no urge to seek out the (presumably small) corpus of
translated Bhutanese literature, so we all pick our poison. But still, Bhutan
versus Boogeyman – it sure doesn’t
seem like that close a call.

World Cinema

But you don’t always get the eye opening
you expect. My personal emblematic recent experience of “Third World” cinema is
Ousmane Sembene’s Moolaade, which
played at last year’s film festival (and is coming to the Cinematheque). It’s a
Senegalese film about female circumcision, and it’s a joy to watch, funny and
accessible but driven by a completely different set of aesthetic considerations
than we see in American or European film. I always hesitate to pronounce with
confidence how much I’ve “learned” from a movie, but even if Moolaade were shown to be narratively
and politically disingenuous (which I don’t think it is, but I don’t suppose
it’s impossible), even the nature of the lie would be informative. The body of
Iranian cinema falls into a similar category, and we’ve seen enough films from
Iran now both to feel that we know something real about the country and to get
a sense for the country’s cinematic conventions. If it’s only a “sense” on my
part, that’s due to my lack of research and study; despite good intentions, I’m
more of a tourist than a true traveller in these lands.

Rick Groen, in The Globe and Mail, cited Iranian cinema in his review of Travellers and Magicians, saying that
director Khyentse Norbu “has clearly fallen under the influence of Iran’s
neo-realist tradition – same theme, same casting” although he then notes
Norbu’s greater visual opulence as an important difference. I would have said
that that’s putting it mildly. Norbu studied politics and filmmaking in the US,
and it shows. His film is about an “officer” in a remote mountain town who gets
his chance to go to America, but only if he reaches a nearby town in three
days’ time. He grabs his boom box and heads off, but when he misses the bus
he’s forced to rely on hitched rides (this on roads that see maybe five
vehicles a day). He meets up with other travellers along the way,including a young woman who starts to grow
profoundly on him, and a monk who tells a long, mystical (and vaguely parallel)
story about a student magician falling under the spell of a mysterious woman.
We see this story in episodes, shot in a gauzy style that contrasts with the main
narrative’s sunlit exteriors.

The Grass Is Greener

Rather than Iranian cinema, the film that
most came to my mind while watching this was Tom Cruise’s The Last Samurai, another lush piece of filmmaking pivoting on a
familiar theme of a skeptical outsider gradually assimilated into an age-old
tradition. The fact that the official here merely dreams of America rather than
coming from there makes little effective difference – at the start he’s
hyperactive, chain-smoking and stand-offish,going to extremes to demonstrate his difference from the locals, and at
the end he’s serene, integrated into the group. Several reviews identify the
film as a cautionary fable on the notion of the grass being greener, but this
is frankly not a very enterprising game plan, if you’re the first feature film
from Bhutan. Norbu has talked in interviews about how spirituality informed the
film’s making, but I simply don’t think this is particularly evident in what he
generated.

The Bhutanese landscapes are wonderful, and
we pick up a few details about the society, but nothing here challenges us or
educates us. We've seen many films (or at least had the chance to see them)
set at the intersection of old and new worlds (to pick merely the first that
comes to mind, The Story of the Weeping
Camel was nominated for an Oscar this year) and by that standard Norbu’s
film is less anthropologically illuminating than its peers. The film uses
non-professionals – for example, the first man he meets, an old apple seller,
was apparently played by a genuine apple seller who had trouble understanding
the whole concept of movie making, multiple takes and so forth. The apple
seller looks authentic enough in the few close-ups of him, but I can see no
substantive way in which it matters whether it was an actor or not – he’s not
called on to do anything going beyond the fictional and decorative.

A First Step

The film has an ambiguous ending that seems
too knowingly so – it seems to withhold easy closure not because it’s reached a
point of complexity that warrants this, but merely for the sake of withholding
easy closure. By which I mean viewers will merely wonder what happened
next, rather than pondering some broader theme or insight.

I’m well aware that by this time the reader
may be on the verge of crumpling up the paper in disgust, for it seems that I’m
merely beating up on the weakest and most defenseless of victims – rather than
sticking the knife into Hitch, what
kind of perversity leads one to attack the first feature film ever made in
Bhutan? I suppose my defense would have to be that if Travellers and Magicians’s value ultimately lies in its
universality and accessibility, then we’re entitled to judge it by universal
and accessible criteria. From my brief reading, Bhutan may truly be one of the
world’s most distinct societies, and it’s a real shame that the film provides
so little sense of it. A few weeks ago I criticized Don McKellar’s Canadian
film Childstar for seeming to define
itself too much with regard to an American reference point, but at least Canada
has the excuse of geographical proximity and cultural similarity. Maybe it took
someone like Norbu, schooled in American logistical savvy as well as its
aesthetics, to take the first step for Bhutanese cinema, and this seals him a
place in film history - a fair-sized footnote at the very least.But it’ll take a little more to justify my
initial assumption about its relative superiority to the fare at the multiplex.

Friday, January 16, 2015

(originally published in The Outreach
Connection in July 2004. I subsequently updated my list here - it hasn't changed much since then)

The Australian website SensesOfCinema.com
has a section devoted to lists of top ten films, and I like that kind of thing,
so I sent mine in. Here it is:

Celine
and Julie Go Boating(Jacques Rivette)

Citizen
Kane(Orson Welles)

Dog
Star Man(Stan
Brakhage)

The
King of Comedy(Martin
Scorsese)

Love
Streams(John Cassavetes)

Ordet(Carl Dreyer)

Orpheus(Jean Cocteau)

Playtime(Jacques Tati)

The
Passenger(Michelangelo
Antonioni)

Rio
Bravo(Howard Hawks)

I added the following note:

which of course fails to do justice to
Hitchcock, Bresson, Pasolini and at least twenty others. If the object were to
select ten films for a desert island, I would have to find room somewhere for
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Band Wagon.

A day later, at least half that list might
have changed. For instance, I regret the omission of That Obscure Object of Desire and Bonnie and Clyde, and although I’m wary of placing too much weight
on recent passions, I think it’s likely that Bamboozled is in fact one of my ten favourites. As for what I did
include, I haven’t actually seen Celine and
Julie go Boating for years, so I’m not completely sure it belongs on there.
But the list had to include a Rivette movie, and this somehow seemed like the
best one. Similarly, Dog Star Man
represents my current passion for Brakhage as a whole. As I get less and less
impressed with Scorsese’s current work, it feels on some level as though The King of Comedy should drop off the
list, and yet it hangs in there.

Man of Culture

There are no silent films on my list (Metropolis or The General would probably come closest, but that felt a bit too
dutiful) and nothing from the 30’s, but otherwise the distribution across the
decades isn’t too bad. I wish there was something from there from outside the
US or Europe – maybe seeing Ozu’s Tokyo
Story again soon will push it up there. It’s a source of great joy to me to
own seven of the ten on DVD (in addition to Celine
and Julie, I eagerly await the release of Love Steams and The Passenger).

I guess this tells you, in a general sort
of way, that my highbrow inclinations are palpable, but not yet overwhelming.
Still, I admit that the list is conditioned in part by some abstract sense of
what my list ought to look like. Once I was in Italy for a business thing, and
the host, who sat next to me at dinner, turned out to be a film enthusiast (to
add some colour to the story, he knew Liliana Caviani who made The Night Porter). We exchanged
observations on Antonioni and Pasolini and Lindsay Anderson’s If and suchlike, and then he looked at
me directly and said, “I must ask you a very important question. Do you like
Fellini?”

With no hesitation, I gave the truthful
response, which was: “No, I’ve never cared for Fellini.” He beamed – that was
the right answer. “You are a true man of culture,” he said. He even agreed with
me that Fellini’s Toby Dammit episode
from Spirits of the Dead was the
director’s best work (partly because it’s shorter than the others). I was as
pleased as Punch with this (being called a true man of culture, by an Italian
guy!) But since then, I’ve started to reassess Fellini upwards. I watched La Dolce Vita again a few months ago and
was completely knocked out by it. But no matter what, I can’t imagine placing a
Fellini film on my top ten list. It’ll never fit the image now.

The most conventional presence on my list
is Citizen Kane, which has topped the
best-established exercise of this kind (a critics' poll carried out every ten
years by Sight and Sound) since 1962.
Jean Renoir’s La Regle du Jeu seemed
to be closing in on Kane, until Vertigo zoomed past it into second place
in 2002 (Vertigo might be 11th
on my own list). The 2002 Sight and Sound
poll had The Godfather/The Godfather II
in fourth place – Coppola’s achievement now looks increasingly like the very
rare work that will stand as both a popular and a critical classic. The rest of
the 2002 top ten looks like this: Tokyo
Story, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Battleship Potemkin, Sunrise, 8 1/2 (Fellini!), Singin’ in the Rain.

Sight
and Sound also carried out a poll of directors,
which Citizen Kane also won, with The Godfather I and II in second. Lawrence of Arabia and Raging Bull are among the alternative
choices on that list. Senses of Cinema
provides various other polls as well, all but one of them showing Citizen Kane as number one (and the
exception had it at second, behind La
Regle du Jeu).

Time of Plenty

There’s also a “Best Movies of all time”
website based on an amalgamation of various sources, which generates the
following top ten: Citizen Kane, La Regle
du Jeu. Vertigo, 8 1/2, Battleship Potemkin, Singin in the Rain, The Gold Rush,
City Lights, L’Avventura and Schindler’s
List . Spielberg’s film scores nowhere in most of these polls, but given
the weighting system employed by that website, got in by virtue of winning the Oscar
and various other awards (the same list has Ben-Hur
as the 24th best film ever made).

Of course, the list-making exercise isn’t
limited to highbrow circles. The American Film Institute has recently been
drumming up good publicity for itself with various tabulations of best American
movies. In its master list, Kane was
number one, followed by Casablanca, The
Godfather and Gone with the Wind
– obviously following a more populist bent. And perhaps the most credible list
of them all in a certain way, by virtue of the numbers of people contributing
to it (over 100,000 voters for some films), is on the Internet Movie Database
at imdb.com. The Godfather is number
one there, followed – to me bizarrely, but you can’t ignore it – by The Shawshank Redemption. All three Lord of the Rings movies show up in the
top ten, so I guess by this measure we’re living in a time of plenty. The only
foreign movie in the top twenty is The
Seven Samurai; Kane is 11th (just behind Star Wars).

I think the fleeting nature of watching
films encourages this kind of exercise: making lists, scrapbooks, collecting
memorabilia – it’s all a way of compensating for the intangibility of the thing
itself, of providing some proof that we really invested all that time, that our
memories have some basis in reality. I’m not much for collecting memorabilia,
but as you can see, I’m into the lists, and for years now I’ve written notes, a
few hundred words or so, on every film I see. Where that all gets me, I don’t
know. Now, excuse me while I reconsider a few things.

Friday, January 9, 2015

The
Orphanage is advertised as emanating “from the
creators of Pan’s Labyrinth” – it’s
“presented by” that film’s director Guillermo del Toro. That was one of the
most distinctive and compelling films of the last few years: superbly visualized,
expertly constructed, and completely mesmerizing; satisfying both as a muscular
adult fairy tale and as a serious minded (if enjoyably lurid) depiction of the
fascist psyche.

The
Orphanage is also in Spanish, but certainly doesn’t
make a comparable impact, not that it ever seems to hold that ambition. This
belongs more to the old dark house genre, with a woman coming back to the
former orphanage where she spent some of her childhood years. The place is
creepy, teeming with dark secrets and traumatic memories, and then her own
young son suddenly disappears, more likely a victim of the spirit world than
the material one.

The film doesn’t go in for too many modern
pyrotechnics, relying on old-fashioned atmosphere and suggestion, for which
it’s perhaps been over-praised. It doesn’t really gather much momentum as a
psychological study, and isn’t at all thematically distinctive, so after a
while it’s all down to seeing how things turn out (like most else in the movie,
the ending is fine, not a cop-out but no big deal either). This seems to be the
first film by director J. A. Bayona, so we can safely label him as promising…he
might turn into another del Toro, or on the other hand might get lost in the
old dark house of Hollywood. It’s not very high on the list of film-related
mysteries that might occupy us.

I am Legend

I am
Legend perhaps has less of that old-fashioned right
stuff, but it’s by far the more compelling and for that matter creepier film.
Based on the Richard Matheson story previously filmed as The Omega Man, it has Will Smith as perhaps the last unaffected
survivor of a viral disaster, left with daytime Manhattan to himself and his
faithful dog Sam; at night, he barricades himself in his Washington Square
house and hides from the others who made it through, as disgusting mutated
vampires.

The movie’s excellently paranoia-bating
curtain raiser has Emma Thompson as a scientist smugly announcing a cure for
cancer; three years later, it’s this viral tampering that’s brought about the
apocalypse. Obviously no more 9-11 generated restraint here; the movie’s most
striking sequences, with the city serving as Smith’s personal playground, may
represent the all-time greatest filmic example of making the best of a bad
situation. Later on the genre wheels start to turn a bit more methodically, but
it’s still good stuff. I couldn’t even start to recall all the antecedents that
come to mind, although Dawn of the Dead,
with its band of survivors holed in the temporary utopia of a suburban shopping
mall, is a prominent one.

Smith is absolutely excellent in a mostly
solo role, and the dog is one of the all-time memorable screen dogs (and may
certainly have the all-time wrenching canine death scene – as a major dog
sentimentalist, I don’t feel guilty for throwing out that spoiler). Except for
some fake looking lions early on, it superbly deploys digital trickery in
support of the grand illusion; like Enchanted,
this movie feels like the master of its technology, where it’s often been the
other way around.

The Great Debaters

If there’s any fancy digital stuff sneaked
into Denzel Washington’s The Great
Debaters, it’s certainly well hidden. This resolutely old-fashioned film
has Washington as the coach of a black debating team in 1930’s Texas. After
triumphing against virtually every black institution in the country, they make
the leap to taking on white opposition, with their eyes on the biggest prize of
all: Harvard.

Oprah Winfrey produced The Great Debaters, so you know this is intended as the kind of
film that’s good for you. But it actually is.
A lot of the storytelling is distinctly run-of-the-mill, but the film is an
honorable and handsome memorial for the period when extensive civil
disobedience for the cause of black equality was still several decades away; it
depicts a lynching and various threatening situations, as well as subtler but
pervasive day to day slights and belittlements. I spent a good chunk of it in a
state of anger, and a good chunk more getting teary (and sometimes both at
once, which I guess would count as hitting the jackpot). Sure, that doesn’t
particularly validate the film as top-quality cinema – a few times a year I see
a film that plays to a somewhat different set of faculties and this was one of
them.

Washington is absurdly charismatic in his
own role, but as a director he doesn’t stretch anyone else in the cast too much
(fellow Oscar winner Forest Whitaker plays too much to stereotype as a
fire-and-brimstone type, although he and Washington do have a good scene
together). The movie also doesn’t exhibit much interest in women, an
unfortunate mismatch given its overall intentions. I can understand the
dismissive reviews it got in numerous quarters – I love the art of cinema, not just motion pictures - and I
don’t want to be pious about it, but it makes more sense spending time on The Great Debaters than various
objectively better films I could mention. I was going to give examples, but
maybe I’ll stop before too much of whatever credibility I have flies out the
window.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a piece of cinema for sure,
and incidentally exhibits ample interest in women. It also provides a good
example of the limitations of The Great
Debaters’ conventional recreation. The centre of it is Jean-Dominique
Baudry, a former editor of French Elle
magazine who was struck down in his early 40’s by “locked-in syndrome,”
rendering him unable to communicate except by opening and closing his one good
eye. Amazingly, Baudry dictated an entire book in this condition, which was
published to acclaim in 1997.

Schnabel’s previous two films were about
artists on the fringe, and this film is in effect a tragic extension of that
theme: left with little more than his memory and imagination, Baudry’s inner
life soars, and the film goes with him. Schnabel makes great use of a
subjective camera to depict his inner state (audaciously, the first fifteen
minutes or so are entirely shot that way), and constructs the picture around
powerful dynamics and contrasts: between current immobility and past
exuberance, the stark interiors of the hospital and the intense but fragile
freedom of the imagined butterfly.

The film is generally in the
triumph-of-the-human-spirit mode – it’s not sugar-coated, but by inclination it
spends much less time on Baudry’s pain, and on the monotony of such
helplessness. This is reasonable in that the frustrations of his condition can
merely be stipulated, but it still limits the film’s overall emotional impact.
But the subject matter is extreme and idiosyncratic enough to slip past normal
expectations of verisimilitude or comprehensiveness. The film conveys an
enormous sense of contentment and inner ventilation, as if Baudry’s unleashed
spirit had seeped into every aspect of its making.

Thursday, January 1, 2015

I was already a little depressed on the day
I saw V for Vendetta, which means
that by the time the movie was over I was probably lucky not to feel suicidal.
Is it just me, or does every second movie now feel like a grim commentary on
the decrepit times we live in? The previous day I’d seen Joyeux Noel (see last week’s review), the French film about the
makeshift 1914 Christmas Day truce between French, German and Scottish soldiers
stuck in the front line trenches. The men are condemned for their actions, and
some of the rhetoric sounds uncannily contemporary. I’m thinking of course of
George W. Bush and his magnificent Iraqi adventure, although our own new
administration will probably spend progressively more time in that section of the
phrase book as well. The saddest thing about this, I realize, is that such
terms as “forces of good,” and “freedom” and “God’s help” have become
hopelessly loaded with undertones of mendacity and cynicism, so that I even
wonder how much of a future they have in their current form. We’ve been lied to
so persistently and thoroughly, on so many levels, that the term “truth” may be
in as much danger.

Our times

Not that it’s unhealthy to go through life
with a degree of engaged skepticism. But surely the ideal state would be one of
confidence in certain inalienable truths, tied to a consensual notion of
perpetuity and progress and general benevolence, against which we push and
agitate based on incremental rather than fundamental concerns. Well, we drift increasingly
far from that. On the most basic issue possible – our long-term survival and
that of our descendants – we have only drift and apathy. As Jeffrey Simpson
recently pointed out in The Globe and
Mail, Stephen Harper’s five key priorities – to which all cabinet
utterances must be directed – are largely useless, pandering sops. They do
nothing to address our long-term sustainability, whether economic or
environmental. And the sad thing is that even this mediocrity is almost
incalculably preferable to the wanton destruction of the US administration, a
body that I must admit I increasingly regard with the paranoia evoked by the
darkest science fiction fantasies.

Saddest of all, as I said, is Bush’s
perverse, completely unwitting, genius– time after time – in turning on their
heads even the most obvious building blocks of reality. Five years ago even
liberals like myself generally accepted the morality and “greater good” of some
notion of a war on terrorism. But now we must face the overwhelming reality that
no amount of cumulative terrorist activity would ever have been as disruptive
as the mess in Iraq. For sure, some lives that would have been lost under
Saddam have been saved; but the insurgency or strife or civil war (call it what
you will) merely substitutes the loss of others; a fragile democratic freedom
gained on the one hand, much basic stability lost on the other. I’m not making
a judgment on this calculus, only suggesting that there has been a criminal
lack of attention to the elements of the equation. Except for one thing of
course: that the neurotic fear of terrorism – regardless of the laughably low
odds of loss in any of our individual cases, compared to almost any of the
other hazards of living – is allowed to trump almost all other considerations.
We possess so much information, so much sense of irony and – to some extent at
least – complexity, and yet we flail in irrationality.

Killing ourselves softly

It’s at such times that I most wonder about
the time I spend on movies. I love them, but at least to the extent we’re
talking of Hollywood, they merely manifest the distractions and misdirections
that saturate our minds at the cost of any engagement with anything that might
matter. When you think about it, there is something truly frightening about the
fact that the outcome of American Idol
is a much more prominent issue in the minds of far more people than the
environment or even Iraq. Oh, I understand the mentality for sure – the easy
identification with the drama on the screen just seems more relevant, because
of its immediacy and accessibility and easy connection with understandable
circuits of pleasure and desire. Well, on such easy waves we're selling our
entitlement to a future. Foolish debt levels financing a consumer boom constructed
largely on the selling of pure crap, the way that the public agenda is hijacked
by minutiae and nonsense, the willingness to place neurotic agendas of morals
and values over any rational consideration of a future strategy – it’s all
easier than the alternative, for now.

I know some readers will agree with
none of this, or even if they do, will think that I have no particular
credibility in these matters (even compared to what little I may possess in
matters movie-related). This is fair enough, and my only justification- rightly or wrongly – is that this is what
is in my head after seeing V for Vendetta.
Which may, as I acknowledged, merely be the intensification of a preexisting
moroseness. In any event, in the little space I have left I should at least try
to justify this as more than an utterly subjective leap. The film, directed by
James McTeigue, is set in an England of the near future that is ruled by an
authoritarian, almost Fascist government that bases its power primarily on fear
fueled by lies. “V” is a masked insurgent, based on Guy Fawkes, who is
apparently the only voice of resistance. Natalie Portman plays a young woman
who falls into his orbit, and gradually becomes politicized.

V for Vendetta

The film looks stylish, but isn’t particularly
well put together otherwise, and even by the standards of the genre one has to
swallow almost countless unlikely achievements by its protagonist (from
single-handedly reclaiming a big stretch of the abandoned London underground to
– most oddly – finding the time to arrange thousands of dominos in the shape of
his personal logo). It can be seen, as David Denby put it in The New Yorker, as a “dunderheaded pop
fantasia that celebrates terrorism and destruction.” But this is the tragic
measure of our times I think, that such a celebration seems to me more relevant
to our circumstances than, say, Capoteor Brokeback Mountain.

“Only the West,” says Denby, “could have
made a movie in which blowing up civic temples (he means the Houses of
Parliament) is a ‘provocative’ media statement.” If so, I’d suggest it’s only
because only the West could misuse and pervert the use of those civil temples
to the extent that they seem to yield poison rather than enlightenment. Yes, V for Vendetta is another calculated product.
But at least its calculations might lead toward productive anger rather than
neutered exultation. The question is – what do we do now?

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).